Ecological specialization and susceptibility to disturbance: conjectures and refutations

Niche breadth of species has been hypothesized to be associated with species' responses to disturbance. Disturbance is usually believed to affect specialists negatively, while generalists are believed to benefit from disturbance; we call this the "specialization-disturbance" hypothesis. We also propose an associated hypothesis (the "specialization-asymmetry-disturbance" hypothesis) under which both specialization and asymmetry of interactions would explain species' responses to disturbance. We test these hypotheses using data from a plant-pollinator system that has been grazed by cattle (i.e., a biological disturbance) in southern Argentina. We quantified specialization in species interactions, specialization of interaction partners, and species' responses to disturbance. We found no relationship between degree of specialization and a species' response to disturbance. We also found that plant-pollinator interactions tend to be asymmetric in this system; there was no relationship between the degree of specialization of a given species and the degree of specialization of its interaction partners. However, asymmetry of interactions did not explain the variability in species' responses to disturbance. Thus, both hypotheses are rejected by our data. Possible reasons include failure to assess crucial resources, substantial direct effects of disturbance, inaccurate measures of specialization, difficulty detecting highly nonlinear relationships, and limitations of a nonexperimental approach. Or, in fact, there may be no relationship between specialization and response to disturbance.